It's been a little rough lately, but that's something I'm attempting to work on together with my therapist.  We'll see if perhaps I'm on the come-up, or not.

Rhythm Quest

I managed to hit 500 wishlists, which of course is pretty small in the grand scheme of things, but still worth being happy over considering the relatively low amount of marketing power I have.

I've been able to continue chugging along with progress on levels despite not being in the greatest place in life, which has been comforting.  Yesterday I managed to put together the first level of world 4 and honestly, it's been surprising to me just how well I've been able to just sit down and try to make something, and have it actually work out well -- whether that be new music, mechanic experimentation, or backdrop artwork.

There are multiple theories as to why this could be the case, but regardless of the reason it's certainly been confidence-inspiring for me.  It could be because I've just already got such a good foundation to work off of...I've got rules in place for how to utilize color palettes throughout my levels, for example.  But even when I tried out a different style of music for world 4, it seemed to just go well without a hitch.

I honestly think a big part of it is just that I'm...simply more skilled at my craft.  More experience has made it easier for me to tackle new challenges.  You can imagine drawing an analogue to cooking -- if you're inexperienced, you might have a few specific recipes comfortably under your belt, but you might struggle more with something that you aren't familiar with.  But after so much accumulated expertise, it's much easier to just throw together something that's still good even if you're unfamiliar with a specific dish/combination, or if you're missing some ingredients.

I think I've been feeling the same thing with my other crafts -- probably to nobody's surprise since I've been at it for so long.  Experimenting during OHC every single week really helps with that, of course -- every week you do something different, and after a while I've started to sometimes really use that opportunity to push out into new and different directions.  This song, for example, is one in which I'm very very heavily leveraging Valhalla Supermassive (a unique and fun reverb plugin) to make otherwise simple sounds really wash over the soundscape and echo everywhere.

Similarly, I feel more confident when I'm trying to come up with new backdrops for Rhythm Quest levels.  Before I sit down it definitely still feels like it's going to be a crapshoot because I don't really have a solid idea of what I'm going to do, but somehow I've just been able to come up with various decent things and not have it be a disaster.

There's more stuff I should probably be polishing up to ensure that the playable demo is nice and presentable, but for now I'm taking this current momentum and just running along with making more levels while I can.

Pokemon Unite

They fixed the exp bug, and it actually does seem like games are a little less snowball-y now, so that's good.  Even if you in particular weren't hit by it, you could just have teammates who were just stuck as a charmander (it's always the charmander...) or wartortle or something because they got ganked early.  Perhaps now you still need to weight teamfighting and showing up for objectives a little more highly as opposed to prioritizing safe farm over everything else, but maybe it's a good middle ground now?

Stuff Coming Up

There actually seems to be quite a bit, actually.  A small gathering, and hair dying, and another meetup after that as well.  And then Fanime is already going to be in a little over a week.  Another friend is visiting from out of town, and then in July I'm going to see if I can finally do the GMTK game jam.  At some point later I have to start packing my stuff up as well.  Got a commissioned piece to do at some point in the next month, but it's just one.

Not really bad...it's not like everything is all happening at once, and not a lot of stress involved probably.  Honestly, it'll probably be a good pace for me overall.

I'll be trying to enter the ALTTPR Go Mode Podcast Mentor tournament as well, which should be fun / healthy for me as well.  At the moment it's just signup and you have to run two async aptitude seeds for them to judge/check your skill level.  I did one so far, which didn't go perfectly but honestly I can't ask for much better.  Will be doing the other one in the coming week or so and then we'll see just how things actually go...

That's about it for now I think...

But what if it =is= my fault?  That we can't go back to the way things were.

I made so many mistakes along the way.  Can they never be undone?

I wrote almost exactly a year ago that "I don't want this to become some massive thing that ends up sucking a year or more of my time from me (and it shouldn't, if I'm doing things right)."  I guess even I am not invulnerable to this sort of thing...

Things are okay.  There's been some good, and some bad, as of course is commonplace.  I didn't get enough sleep, for no good reason...I'll be trying to catch up a little bit.

Rhythm Quest

First things first, Rhythm Quest is now up on Steam for wishlisting!  I've been spamming the link for everyone to hopefully go check it out and wishlist it, and I'm up to a...decent (?) 100+ wishlists after day one.  I'm sure there's a lot more that I need to do in order to get that number up (gotta get those metrics up for store visibility...), but as with everything I do, that's something that I'll try and approach gradually, as it makes sense.

Here's the link: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1635640/Rhythm_Quest/

Movies

I've watched a lot of stuff recently -- somewhat uncommon for me -- but it's been nice.  Turning Red and Everything Everywhere All at Once were highlights, but first season of Avatar was not bad either (a mix of "decent", "good", and "eh..." at various parts).  I watched Encanto as well; that one was more just "oh, it's a Disney movie", so more unremarkable in its actual storytelling.  I finished reading Crying in H Mart too...lots of stories about intergenerational relationships.

Pokemon Unite

A new season of Unite released, along with probably the biggest balance patch that they've had so far, nerfing two of the most-used held items, including a massive nerf to buddy barrier, meaning everyone is more squishy in teamfights.  By far the biggest change has been to the way that experience is gained, which has been......interesting.  I can't say I agree with the change, though part of the experience is definitely tarnished by the fact that there's a passive exp bug with evolution-based pokemon now, which somewhat conflates the issue.  But the long and short of it is that games seem much more snowball-heavy now since neutral farm seems to be less rewarding and KOs seem to be much more rewarding.  In theory you might imagine that this rewards more skill in terms of getting a lead and keeping a lead as opposed to having too much comeback potential, but the reality of it is that it just makes the game seem very volatile (especially in an environment where you can't control what happens with the rest of your team) and offers less play to combat an early deficit (or at least that's what it feels like).  This could be partly just due to people not understanding how to adapt to the new balance of things, but...I'm also not confident that the average person's play patterns will change much.  It's a bit of a sour taste that reminds me of the worse aspects of other MOBAs that I've played, so...we'll see.

Chickies

The two chickies are doing just fine still -- dumbchicky has gone through her (apparently regular) cycle of brooding and then molting and is now finally back to laying again (sigh).  They've been getting a lot of outside time these days when I'm around; I think they just prefer it that way anyways and I feel relatively safe keeping them in the run during the day while I'm around.  I'd better look into getting them a real coop and run combo next year, I think they'll probably be more happy if they can go and forage and nest as they please...